ns out to be a very flat
performance. But all the time the eating and the drinking go on, and the
clatter and clink of it fill the air; so that the great object of the
fair is not lost sight of.

Meantime, where is the agricultural fair and cattle-show? You must know
that we do these things differently in Bavaria. On the fair-ground,
there is very little to be seen of the fair. There is an inclosure where
steam-engines are smoking and puffing, and threshing-machines are making
a clamor; where some big church-bells hang, and where there are a few
stalls for horses and cattle. But the competing horses and cattle are
led before the judges elsewhere; the horses, for instance, by the royal
stables in the city. I saw no such general exhibition of do mestic
animals as you have at your fairs. The horses that took the prizes
were of native stock, a very serviceable breed, excellent for
carriage-horses, and admirable in the cavalry service. The bulls and
cows seemed also native and to the manor born, and were worthy of little
remark. The mechanical, vegetable, and fruit exhibition was in the
great glass palace, in the city, and was very creditable in the fruit
department, in the show of grapes and pears especially. The products of
the dairy were less, though I saw one that I do not recollect ever to
have seen in America, a landscape in butter. Inclosed in a case, it
looked very much like a wood-carving. There was a Swiss cottage, a
milkmaid, with cows in the foreground; there were trees, and in the rear
rose rocky precipices, with chamois in the act of skipping thereon. I
should think something might be done in our country in this line of the
fine arts; certainly, some of the butter that is always being sold so
cheap at St. Albans, when it is high everywhere else, must be strong
enough to warrant the attempt. As to the other departments of the fine
arts in the glass palace, I cannot give you a better idea of them than
by saying that they were as well filled as the like ones in the American
county fairs. There were machines for threshing, for straw-cutting, for
apple-paring, and generally such a display of implements as would give
one a favorable idea of Bavarian agriculture. There was an interesting
exhibition of live fish, great and small, of nearly every sort, I
should think, in Bavarian waters. The show in the fire-department was so
antiquated, that I was convinced that the people of Munich never intend
to have any fires.

T